Filed under: Etc., Celebrities
We’ve been hearing about Adam Carolla’s The Car Show for months, and we can now confirm that the show has been picked up by SPEED Channel. The folks at SPEED dropped us a line to let us know that the show has been picked up for 13 episodes, with an option for 13 more. The hour-long show, which is scheduled for a July premiere, will be hosted by Adam Carolla, super auto journalist Dan Neil, former NBA player John Salley and Matt Farrah of The Smoking Tire. SPEED hasn’t even released a press release yet, but we’ll get something official once the show’s July production schedule is fleshed out.
We told you back in December that Carolla’s show will feature news and car conversations plus the typical pre-recorded features. And don’t get too attached to The Car Show as the show’s name, as SPEED tells us that there is a good chance it will change. The show will be produced by Mandt Bros. Productions.
We’re not sure how this show will turn out, but you can bet that we’ll be watching when it hits the airwaves in July.
[Image: Mitchell Zachs/AP]
Adam Carolla’s The Car Show gets picked up by SPEED originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Motorsports, Europe, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, UK, Racing
SLS AMG GT3 and Ford Focus touring car make their race debut – Click either image for high-res gallery
Teething pains are normal when developing a race car. Save for series like Formula One where every team is starting with a new car at the beginning of each season, it’s to be expected that a new race car will face some difficulties when competing in its first race. That’s what makes this past weekend’s results so extraordinary.
Instead of being relegated to the garage with mechanical troubles, as you might expect from a new racing machine, both the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 and the Ford Focus touring car scored podium finishes on their race debuts this past weekend.
The race-prepped neo-gullwing finished third overall and first in the GT3 class at the opening round of the VLN Nürburgring Endurance Championship, fielded by the Black Falcon team. A second SLS followed in fourth place overall, with another two finishing 7th and 19th. The series consists of ten endurance races, all competed around a combination of the Nordschleife and Grand Prix circuits at the Nürburgring, and this race marked the first time that the SLS GT3, having completed its testing phase, was fielded entirely by privateers with no factory support. BMW claimed victory with a one-two finish in the M3 GT, while the Pininfarina P4/5 failed to complete the race.
The Ford triumph, meanwhile, came in the opening round of the British Touring Car Championship. As we reported recently, the BTCC is benefiting from a large field of competition that’s unprecedented in size, but the new Focus surmounted the odds by cementing a third-place finish in the first of three races on the Indy configuration at Brands Hatch. Tom Chilton scored that podium finish in the “Global Ford Focus” racer while Andy Neate finished 11th in the second car, and while neither fared as well in the second or third races (finishing 11/12 and 8/15 respectively), that they finished each race at all was an accomplishment in and of itself for the new Focus and for Team AON which fielded them.
The checkered flags in the first two races went to Fifth Gear presenter and defending series champion Jason Plato in the Chevrolet Cruze, with two-time former BTCC champ Matt Neal taking the win in the third race behind the wheel of the Honda Civic. Press releases after the jump.
[Sources: Mercedes-Benz, Team AON]
Continue reading Podium finishes for Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3, Ford Focus BTCC at race debuts
Podium finishes for Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3, Ford Focus BTCC at race debuts originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Zunguzungu’s got an excellent, nuanced piece on the creation and attribution of value in newsgathering and reporting. Zz reminds us that the current arrangement is perfect arbitrary and contingent: no underlying universal principle reifies certain news-related activities (writing the story), ascribes no ownership stake to other activities (sources quoted and unquoted, tipoffs, references); and damns yet another set of activities (curating, aggregating and commenting upon the news).
I’m interested in the way that “old media” people resort to ad hominem and obfuscation when challenged on commercial matters — a few nominal news-pros recently wrote that Boing Boing wasn’t entitled to comment on the viability of paywalls unless we did so while hiding from bombs in Libya (nevermind that these gentlemen were writing from the comfort of their own safe American living rooms). There’s certainly a lot of do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do in the current round of future-of-news handwringing: this is the narrative that allows a “newspaper” whose news is ninety percent curated picks from the newswires, run verbatim without comment or context, to be full of democratic virtue; while websites that examine, criticize and contextualize those same stories are parasites who contribute nothing.
The more you talk about piracy, it seems to me, the more you bump into the uncomfortable fact that journalism is only distinguishable from word-piracy because, and to the extent that, we arbitrarily decide that it is. We have social conventions that determine what is and isn’t okay to say and steal, and how to do so — institutional rules defining the difference between socially useful activities and socially un-useful activities — but while those conventions are under particular stress right now (file this under “the internet”) they were also never quite as stable as we might have liked to think they were. This is not to say that they aren’t necessary, useful, and worth retaining, of course. They just aren’t written in stone, nor were they received from on high; they are a contingent function of what it is that we expect “the press” to do as part of the social function they fulfill. Which is why, ultimately, the kind of society that we believe “good journalism” will serve will be the determinant of what standards we use in defining what is good in journalism.
That line of thinking, however, would take the conversation in a different direction than either Keller or Huffington want it to go. This is because they are not, a such, interested in the social function of “the press” — for which, see Jay Rosen’s manifesto — but rather, in the business of profiting from their activities. This should not surprise us, but neither should it escape our notice: their job is to make information commodities, to secure ownership of them, and then find some way to sell them. “Real Journalism” talk, in that context, is just market fetishizing, a way of mystifying the work of social production that makes “news” possible, so that it can appear to be the original creation of whoever is selling it to you. Never mind all the different people whose unpaid contributions made the production of the story possible (the original tipoff, unquoted sources, quoted subjects, the reference works consulted, etc); they will not be paid or credited for intellectual labor, because of the magic thing that happens when the story has been published: having become news, it will subsequently be considered the sole production of the New York Times or whoever. And if Arianna Huffington steals it, now, she becomes indistinguishable from a Somali pirate. Once we have decided where ownership of information begins — whose intellectual labor counts and whose does not — then we can proceed to sell it.
Why Arianna Huffington is Bill Keller’s Somali Pirate
(via Making Light)
(Image: Piracy, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from toobydoo’s photostream)
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CWA is the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Now in it’s 63rd year, the conference brings together scientists, politicians, activists, journalists, artists, and more for a week of fascinating conversations. It’s free, and open to the public. Think of CWA as the democratic version of TEDtalks. I’m at the conference all this week and will be posting and tweeting about some of the interesting things that I learn.
Short answer: Because extinction doesn’t happen in a vacuum. When one species dies out, it can have further reaching implications for the ecosystem that species lived in. Case in point: Coral reefs. You’ve probably heard a lot about coral reefs dying. But it’s not always spelled out that these deaths are more than just a loss of biodiversity. During a panel on Tuesday, Peter Hildebrand—an atmospheric scientist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center—did a nice job of putting this issue into stark relief.
“Coral reefs supply a lot of the basis of the food chain in the ocean. If we wreck up the climate, then we change concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air, which means we’re changing the pH levels in the water, and that chemical change damages the shells in the coral. As coral die, that damage has effects right up the food chain to the large fish that we eat.”
Image: Some rights reserved by mattk1979
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Filed under: Europe, Plants/Manufacturing, Saab, Earnings/Financials
Last week, we told you about the on-off three-day work stoppage at Saab’s Trolhättan plant, which occurred due to a financial dispute with one or more suppliers. Spyker CEO Victor Muller then publicly insisted that the delay was nothing more than a “minor glitch” due to a short-term liquidity problem.
But new reports indicate that Trollhättan is down again for a second day this week, and the work stoppage could go on for several more days. According to Reuters, Saab spokesperson Gunilla Gustavs says that the automaker is working hard to resolve the issue, adding “we are trying to reach a resolution with the suppliers.”
If money is the automaker’s biggest stumbling block to paying off suppliers, Vladimir Antonov could be the answer. The wealthy Russian has expressed interest in buying into Saab in the past, and if he were permitted to invest capital, we’re thinking Saab would insist on the liquid, spendable kind.
Due to the work stoppages and liquidity issues, there is a lot of speculation that Saab’s very survival could be in doubt, though the company’s new administration has said since Day One that they had a fully funded business plan through 2012, an assertion that now looks to be on shaky ground. As one might expect, Saab isn’t being completely transparent about what’s going on, but there should be no danger of dealers running out of units to sell – slow sales has meant that the Swedish automaker has a substantial backlog of unsold units in most markets, including here in North America. One thing is for sure, this situation is starting to get really ugly. Hat tip to Louis!
[Source: Reuters | Image: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty]
Report: Saab suffers another production stoppage as supplier woes mount originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Government/Legal, Recalls, Safety
Recalls can be a big problem for car rental companies. The companies make money by renting as many vehicles in advance as possible, and an entirely booked fleet can be a recipe for profits. But what happens when there is a recall on a car or truck that is already scheduled for rental? Does the rental company call the customer and tell them that their order can no longer be fulfilled? In some cases, the rental company may want to wait until the vehicle isn’t needed to get the problem looked at, which could potentially put the customer at risk.
How do you fix the problem of rental car companies failing to execute their recalls in a timely manner? The New York Times reports that the American Car Rental Association, which consists of 95 companies and all major renters with the exception of Hertz, feels a two-tier recall system would work best. Under the two-tier system, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and automakers would determine which recalls were serious enough that they needed to be done immediately, and which ones could wait a bit. The multi-tier approach would, in theory, force rental car companies to act quickly for serious recalls, while still maintaining the luxury of waiting for the right time to repair others. Rental companies would no doubt love such an arrangement, but safety advocates aren’t so sure.
NHTSA’s response is that the agency takes all recalls seriously, while other advocates like Rosemary Shahan, the president of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety calls the proposal “rental car roulette” and says that it will “allow rental car companies to get away with renting out vehicles that are so unsafe they are being recalled.” Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into the fact that dealers are legally forbidden to sell vehicles with open recalls while rental companies can rent cars to customers with open recalls.
[Source: The New York Times]
Report: Car rental industry advocates for two-tier recall system originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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